Vernon all for transparency — under legal threat: Breaking Views

There’s irony amidst the malfeasance in Vernon, one of Southern California’s little “cities” run as profit centers for the few.

Now that Vernon is being sued by one of its obscenely overpaid former city managers, the city is waving around a report highly critical of him — which it completely suppressed back when he was running things.

Before there was Robert Rizzo, the infamous city manager of Bell, there was Bruce Malkenhorst, Vernon’s city manager who as long ago as the late 1980s was California’s highest paid public official. He retired in 2005, after prosecutors charged him with corruption, and received the state’s largest public pension — more than half a million dollars a year. Malkenhorst was convicted, then CalPERS found that his pension had not been properly earned and slashed it to $115,000. Now Malkenhorst is suing Vernon to try to require the city to pay him the portion of his CalPERS pension that he lost.

But what did council members do with the report when they received it in 2004? Why, they suppressed it, refusing to let L.A. County prosecutors look at it, removed the report from City Hall and fired the city attorney who wrote it.

But today’s Vernon leaders, under threat of lawsuit by Malkenhorst, have dusted off the 9-year-old report to use against him.